i mean what’s so special about about the number 13?
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13 episodes a season was seen as ideal, because after 4 seasons you will have 52 episodes, enough to show one episode a week for an entire year. So 13 and 26 episode seasons, being 1/4 and 1/2 of the weeks in a year are common.
This is basically a standard in the TV industry, not just for animated series, but also for non-animated series. It was based on a TV “season” that ran from September to April or May, combined with how making episodes fit into a production schedule. Producers found that 26 episodes worked to fit into this pattern, back in the 1960s. Sometimes, when networks ordered a series to be produced, they would purchase a full season of 26 episodes, and sometimes they would purchase only a half of a season, which was 13 episodes. They’d choose the 13 episodes to produce if it was a mid-season replacement (starting January rather than September) or if they didn’t have the budget for a full 26, or if they didn’t feel confident enough about the show to do 26, and wanted to see how the early episodes did before committing the budget to 26.
Then as production values went up over the decades, particularly in the 1990s, it became more difficult to do 26 episodes in the allotted time so this gradually shortened until 22 episodes per season became the norm. But the half seasons just stayed at 13 episodes. So ordering 13 episodes of a given animated show fit this pattern of 13 episodes being a standard low episode order to see how a show did before making a larger commitment.
Never worked in television, but have done scheduling out the wazoo since the turn of the century as an educator, writer, and manager.
Thirteen ends us being a very useful, if not powerful, number is scheduling. 52 divided by 4 is 13 — so each season has thirteen weeks. That means, going at one a week, you can knock out one a week for, say, a team you only have on hand for the Fall.
It’s a tiny bit bigger than twelve, and twelve, as the Babylonians knew, was very useful for being so easily divisible by six, four, three, and two.
There’s a certain “neatness” to thirteen. Ten can be too little and fifteen too much. But thirteen of something (chapters in a book or, say you’re pointing out, episodes in a season, can seem just right).
Thirteen is an odd number, suddenly becomes even and tidy when multiplied by two or four (26 and 52), though I think this is a property of all primes.
In short, I like thirteen, and would jump at a heartbeart to changing to a thirteen month calendar.
That’s half of the 26 episodes most tv shows in general make, creating half a year of new episodes per show.
Animation is expensive, it’s hard to make enough money to justify making more.
Because it’s half of 26? I wonder if that’s around the time when TV shows started having two seasons in the time period that was a single season when I was a kid. The season used to start with autumn, around the third week of September. There would be a little bit of a hiatus as Christmas specials took over in December – yes, December, not necessarily November – then the season would resume shortly before or after New Year’s. Season generally ended in late May or early to mid June. It’s really funny to me to see some new show claim that it’s been on for 10 seasons! when it’s only been on for five years, maybe.
It also took like a month to make one animated show. They would send the key frames to Japan or South Korea for the animators to draw and then to send back, by boat.
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